Buenos Aires Uber drivers ask passengers to ride upfront to avoid vigilante attacks - an Argentine judge has ruled Uber illegal and the country’s banks have cut off Uber’s access. The city’s taxi cartel has shut down roads and brought violence and arson upon Uber...
When industry wants science to say something, how do they do it? Last Year The Nation showed us how in their special investigation, “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe.” In 1993, a lawsuit alleged that cell phones caused a woman’s terminal brain...
“If this bill passes, many people will suffer greatly, and needlessly, as a direct result.” “This sounds like hyperbole. It is not.” So began a letter from Dr. Beatrice Alexandra Golomb, against a bill that would roll out 5G networks across California. The professor...
Canada leads the world in the transition to digitized commerce. With more than two credit cards per capita, the cashless economy is approaching swiftly. The move has been largely voluntary, driven by convenience, and half of Canadians favor dispensing with notes and...
Recently, the United Nations estimated that the population of Planet Earth had reached eight billion souls. Despite the chatter of the highly subsidized climate doomster complex this is quite an achievement - it certainly indicates that the carrying capacity of our...
Anti-lockdown protests are now taking place across China - the Chinese equivalent of our Truckers’ Convoy. The protests are a reaction to the brutal policies that literally lock people in their apartments, when even one infection is detected. As in Canada, when...
In spite of all the hype around Internet video, the traditional broadcasting system continues to very well. The CRTC’s "Communications Monitoring Report 2012" was released in September. http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/PolicyMonitoring/2012/cmr.htm It...
You might be forgiven for thinking that the days of waiting three to six months to get a phone hooked up at your house were long gone. Surely that was all fixed when the telephone companies were privatized and the efficiencies and competition of the market started...
The CRTC is holding a proceeding to establish a Code of Conduct for the Wireless Industry (meaning cell phones). This is unusual for the telecom industry although it has been used by the CRTC on the broadcasting side. The Broadcasting Code for Advertising to Children is one example. It isn’t traditional tariff regulation, it isn’t relying more on market forces, it is a kind of guided self-regulation, likely with penalties for violations.
Consumer anger has led three provinces to legislate provincial codes on mobile phone contracts. The big cell phone companies through the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) proposed the Code of Conduct to avoid more legislation at the provincial level and having to deal with different rules in every province. It took years to get the provinces out of telecommunications regulation and have a national market with the same rules and yet now, they are coming back into it through this path.
How did we get ourselves to this point? Terrence Corcoran takes the consumers groups to task as leftist anti-market economic illiterates here.
He claims that the figures show that the market is competitive, consumers have no right to complain if they don’t read their contracts and that the CRTC and the provincial governments should get out of the way of business and let them compete. Up to a point, I agree with this view, generally favouring free market competition as the best result for consumers.
…the Commission must evaluate applications for a change in effective control against the objectives set out in the (Broadcasting) Act, as well as its own policies and regulations. The Commission considers that the concerns related to competition, ownership...
Among advocates of big government and Keynesian countercyclical stimulus, one subject keeps coming up: infrastructure. They’re always arguing the short- and long-term benefits of building new highways, bridges, tunnels, urban light-rail systems, or, the Holy Grail itself, a national high-speed rail network.
Google finds itself at the forefront of inevitable tensions between cultures and tradition and broader human freedoms.
David Seymour evaluates his earlier prediction that ubiquitous smart phones will transform the taxi industry by analyzing the current market and regulatory environment.
US cablecos and telcos are upset that Kansas City gave Google a better deal on access to municipal infrastructure than they get. Now they want the same deal, complaining that the Google deal is unfair and "not a level playing field"...
Driverless cars could significantly reduce gridlock and traffic accidents. But while the technology may be road ready in the near future, there are a number of significant barries to widespread adoption.